The Kiss (1896) (aka The May Irwin Kiss, The Rice-Irwin Kiss and The Widow Jones)
D. William Heise for Thomas Edison

This most popular short film (an Edison Vitascope film made in Edison's Black Maria studio) was thought to be scandalizing. It was the first filming of a couple's kiss that was recreated from the two well-known stage actors' (May Irwin and John Rice) performance in the hit Broadway play The Widow Jones. The Edison catalogue advertised it thus: "They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time."

Many disapproved and considered it inappropriate to view two physically-unattractive people magnified on the screen during an extended kiss. As one contemporary critic wrote: "The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting."

The Birth Of A Nation (1915)
D. D. W. Griffith

This groundbreaking, landmark American film masterpiece about two families during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods was also extremely controversial and explicitly racist. It was based on former North Carolina Baptist minister Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s anti-black, 1905 bigoted play, The Clansman, the second volume in a trilogy.

Its release set up a major censorship battle over its extremist depiction of African Americans, although Griffith naively claimed that he wasn't racist at the time. Unbelievably, the film is still used today as a recruitment piece for Klan membership - and in fact, the organization experienced a revival and membership peak in the decade immediately following its initial release. And the film stirred new controversy when it was voted into the National Film Registry in 1993, and when it was voted one of the "Top 100 American Films" (at # 44) by the American Film Institute in 1998.

The subject matter of the film caused immediate criticism by the newly-created National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its racist and "vicious" portrayal of blacks, its proclamation of miscegenation, its pro-Klan stance, and its endorsement of enslavement. As a result, two scenes were cut (a love scene between Reconstructionist Senator and his mulatto mistress, and a fight scene).

In the scenes that remained, one recreated the first historic session of the legislature during Reconstruction, in which freed negro legislators were luridly and angrily portrayed as mocking the ideals of the Old South and shown as power-crazy, shiftless, lazy, idiotic, sitting shoeless (sprawled with bare feet upon their desks) and drinking in their legislature seats. In another, mulatto leader Silas Lynch (George Siegmann), lusting for power and miscegenation, attempted to force marriage upon Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish) - by force if necessary. During the most famous sequence in the film, excitement was heightened by shots of the Klan alternating with shots of the endangered Elsie - the film exhibited masterful parallel editing. Along a country road, the Klansman rode to their appointed mission - to first rescue Elsie, and then to rescue the entire Cameron family along with one of the Stoneman boys. In a diagonally-angled shot, a long line of KKK riders came into view from the distance.

The film was thoroughly renounced as "the meanest vilification of the Negro race" and for its depiction of blacks as childlike, conniving, and sexually animalistic. Riots broke out in major cities (Boston, Philadelphia, among others), and it was denied release in many other places (Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, eight states in total). Subsequent lawsuits and picketing tailed the film for years when it was re-released (in 1924, 1931, and 1938). Ironically, although the film was advertised as authentic and accurate, the film's major black roles in the film -- including the Senator's mulatto mistress, the mulatto politican brought to power in the South, and faithful freed slaves -- were stereotypically played and filled by white actors - in blackface. [The real blacks in the film only played in minor roles.]

Freaks (1932)
D. Tod Browning

This MGM horror production starred real-life circus side-show performers (a cornucopia of 'human oddities', including Siamese twins Daisy and Violet, Prince Randian - the "Living Torso", Johnny the 'half-boy', the armless girl, the bearded lady, and three 'pinheads' or microcephalics). It was an out-of-the-ordinary picture not easily forgotten, causing both revulsion and fascination.

In the film's terrorizing and shocking climax, strong man Hercules (Henry Victor) and aerialist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) were both pursued in parallel by the grotesque 'freaks' with knives during a stormy night, crawling through mud in vengeful pursuit of their victims. The film was released officially (five months after disastrous preview showings) and found to be exploitative, abhorrent and "loathsome" with "unwholesome shockery", although it also portrayed the 'abnormal and the unwanted' as resilient and adaptable human beings with complete compassion and understanding. Overall, it made audiences uncomfortable and engendered fright, uneasiness and animosity.

After initial preview screenings, MGM ordered Browning to remove the alarming film's most "offensive" segments (approximately 26 minutes), including the original closing scene of an emasculated Hercules singing falsetto (after castration) in "Tetrallini's Freaks and Music Hall". And a final epilogue was tacked on with a 'happy ending' to lessen the shock of the film's original ending -- the sight of Cleopatra ("the peacock of the air") turned into a legless human chicken with one eye blinded. However, the changes in the film did not improve the film's box-office business and it was a major financial failure. Tod Browning's career, which was booming after directing Dracula (1931), was destroyed.

MGM pulled the film from distribution a month after its release, and in 1947, exhibition rights were sold to exploitation filmmaker/distributor Dwain Esper for the next 25 years. It was toured for an adults-only roadshow with alternative titles (i.e., Forbidden Love, The Monster Show, and Nature's Mistakes), exploitative taglines, such as: "Do Siamese Twins Make Love?" and "Can a Full Grown Woman Truly Love a Midget?" The film was banned outright in England for 31 years (until the early 1960s).

Ecstasy (1933, Czech.) (aka Exstase)
D. Gustav Machaty

This early, scandalous Czechoslovakian foreign erotic drama was once notorious, earth-shattering, and scandalous. It was notable as being the first theatrically-released film in which the sex act (sexual intercourse) was depicted. It was unusual at its time for depicting female sexual pleasure during orgasm (simulated).

It told the story of a sexually-frustrated child-bride named Eva (Vienna-born 20 year-old Hedwig Kiesler, or later known as Hedy Lamarr in her fifth film) who had married a middle-aged, impotent Emil (Zvonimir Rogoz), and fled in dismay to her widowed father's estate where she was close to nature.

It was censored for its two shocking scenes - in a naturalistic locale reminiscent of the Garden of Eden: a nude swim and naked forest romp in sun-lit woods to pursue her horse Loni (which had run off with her clothes), and an adulterous love-making scene (with an obvious expression of sexual awakening, fulfillment and orgasmic pleasure on her face in a close-up) in a cottage during a rainstorm with a handsome young engineer/surveyor named Adam (Aribert Mog), who had earlier retrieved her horse and clothes.

The foreign import was blocked in 1935 by US Customs from entering the US for its obscenity, marking the first instance of customs laws prohibiting a film from entering the US. The U.S. Treasury Department upheld a Commissioner of Customs decision to prohibit the import, although it was later imported in a censored version. Hitler banned the film, and Pope Pius XII denounced it.

Triumph Of The Will (1935, Ger.)
D. Leni Riefenstahl

Nazi Fuhrer leader Adolf Hitler commissioned dancer/actress-turned filmmaker Leni Rienfenstahl to make this notorious documentary to record and celebrate the sixth Nazi Reich Party Congress held in September 1934 in Nuremberg. This spectacular propagandistic film glorified and praised the might of the unjust and evil Nazi regime and state with masterful images, rapid cuts, a Wagnerian score, and ingenious camera angles and compositions.

This infamous, extravagant two-hour film is still considered the most powerful propaganda film ever made, with grandiose opening shots of Messianic Hitler's arrival by plane, his heroic entrance and adulation by saluting ("Sieg Heil") multitudes and uniformed party members and soldiers (and Hitler Youth), and his charismatic exalted character during rousing speeches. Director Riefenstahl was imprisoned by the Allies for four years after the war, although she continued to protest by insisting that her work was purely historical and an example of cinema verite, rather than the repellent work which it was criticized and accused of being.

Protests greeted Riefenstahl at a 1974 Telluride Film Festival tribute, and the Anti-Defamation League decried a 1975 screening in Atlanta as ''morally insensitive.'' Riefenstahl herself never shook her Nazi-tainted past, and repeatedly claimed the film was more imagery than ideological.

Child Bride (1938) (aka Child Bride of the Ozarks)

The film's exploitational taglines: "A throbbing drama of shackled youth!" and "Where Lust was called Just!" hinted at its 'educational' plot contents designed to circumvent the Production Code restrictions with a story that warned against underage marriage. This independent film was 'road-showed' by legendary roadshowman Kroger Babb, although it was banned in many locations due to its infamous underage nudity.

The film supposedly had a positive purpose: "...if our story will help to abolish Child Marriage - it will have served its purpose." It told about the door-to-door moral crusade of schoolteacher Miss Carol (Diana Durrell) to rid the Ozark rural community of Thunderhead Mountain of hillbillies (especially Warner Richmond as Jake Bolby) courting and marrying underage girls.

The film's most notorious and gratuitous sequence was at the 30 minute mark -- a 4 minute undressing and nude skinny-dip in a pond surrounded with woods by nubile young 12 year-old actress Shirley Mills (not Miles) in her screen debut (as Jennie Colton), accompanied by young friend Freddie Nulty (Bob Bollinger). As she disrobed, she told him not to undress but to stay onshore and be a lookout, and they discussed how their physical differences were beginning to show:

Freddie: "I'll beat you undressed, Jennie."
Jennie: "Freddie, you ain't goin' swimmin' with me no more. So don't you take your clothes off."
Freddie: "Aw, you're teasin'."
Jennie: "No, I'm not. I mean it."
Freddie: "We've always gone in swimmin' together. Why not now?"
Jennie: "Teacher says not to."
Freddie: "Why?"
Jennie: "Well because, because we're not what we used to be."
Freddie: "You mean, we're different. How?"
Jennie: "Naw. We're the same, only you can't see me without my clothes on."
Freddie: "How come? I know how you look without your clothes on. I've seen ya lots of times, haven't I?"
Jennie: "Yes, I know, but now we're grown up and barin'. Teacher says that I shouldn't put bad ideas into your head."
Freddie: "Aw shucks. Now I can't kiss ya no more."
Jennie: "Of course you can, silly. Only with my clothes on."
Freddie: "All right, but I wish that teacher would mind her own business."
Jennie: "Now don't beg."

At the end of her long and playful swim, she was leered at by Jake from a nearby ridge, and an old women startled the voyeuristic Jake by asking: "Pretty, ain't she?" When Freddie noticed, he alerted Jennie and she swam for cover.